Yes, it is mostly appliances, but an (informal?) stated goal of NetBSD is too run on all computing hardware.

• FreeBSD = user-friendly free Unix (plus ZFS and jails 😀)
• OpenBSD = very secure free Unix (no ZFS 🙁 but has the VMM hypervisor 😀)
• OpenIndiana = user-friendly free Unix that runs old Solaris software (plus ZFS and zones 😀)
• NetBSD = runs on any computer chip ever built within the past 40 years (some ZFS support, but no zones, jails, or VMs 🙁)

Naturally, that makes NetBSD a good choice for appliances, especially ones that might only have limited memory.

(Here is a quick explainer on the difference between Jails, Zones, Containers, and VMs)

EDIT1: someone pointed out to me that ZFS is not supported on OpenBSD. Sorry about that everyone.

EDIT2: there is a ZFS driver for NetBSD

"I just threw a dead squirrel in a shoe box and installed NetBSD on it." is one of the bash.org quotes I still remember.

From "back in the day" the big claim was that NetBSD would run on anything. Portability seemed to be their major goal.

Somewhat confused this is in a linux community when none of these OS are linux based. Are we lacking on BSD communities?

There's no specific point in any of *BSD. They all are general purpose OSes. NetBSD forked from FreeBSD, OpenBSD forked from NetBSD. Conflicts between developers were main reasons for that.

I think the point is network appliances but it seems mainly used by hobbyists from what I’ve seen.

OpenBSD = Security

It is actually correctless. OpenBSD = Correctness + Simple + Free (free from copyleft too)

FreeBSD = The main UNIX-like

Citation???

NetBSD

maximum portability??

But up to NetBSD 10 (at the time writing it was not released) YOU DON'T HAVE SSL CERTIFICATES INSTALLED IN THE BASE SYSTEM !

That's my warning :)

NetBSD, from their own website:

The NetBSD Project's goals

A project has no point if it doesn't have goals. Thankfully, the NetBSD Project has enough goals to keep it busy for quite some time. Generally speaking, the NetBSD Project:

provides a well designed, stable, and fast BSD system,
avoids encumbering licenses,
provides a portable system, which runs on many hardware platforms,
interoperates well with other systems,
conforms to open systems standards as much as is practical.

In summary: The NetBSD Project provides a freely available and redistributable system that professionals, hobbyists, and researchers can use in whatever manner they wish.

Based on the name of have assumed it’s be used in things like network appliances but in 20 years I’ve never seen a single device use it.

The name comes from being develop over the internet, when that was still a pretty new concept. It's pretty popular among Japanese ISP's iirc.

If you're at all interested in unix, you should try NetBSD. Open has security as a focus...although some of that is overstated imo. FreeBSD is clearly targeting servers, even if it is all purpose.

NetBSD is less popular, but it's clean, lightweight, portable, has pkgsrc. Think of Net as a cross between Open and Free.

And then you have NomadBSD if you need an OS in a usb stick :)